The AddThis Blog

Note: This has been cross-posted on the Clearspring blog.

Friends, I have some great news. With your help, we’ve been nominated for three categories of Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Clearspring has been nominated for best in Embeddable Widgets. AddThis has been nominated for best in Blog Plugins and and Social Bookmarking.

All I can say is THANK YOU!. Your nominations & votes mean so much to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. It’s all of your time, thoughts, and feedback, which have helped to make our tools best-in-class. We’re absolutely a team in this process.

Well, we need your help again. We’re on to Round 1 of voting for the Open Web Awards. Mashable has created these handy dandy widgets to help with the voting process. (See the links below) We’ve taken their widgets and wrapped them with our widget platform Launchpad so that you can place them and share them all over the Web.

Until midnight on November 30th, you can vote once for Clearspring and AddThis every 24 hours in the categories we’re in.

Thanks again for all your help with this. Here are the widgets:

• http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/4924620681b3acab
• http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/492462b6a605d963
• http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/4924634b7f5eef06

Friends, first let me introduce myself. My name is Justin Thorp. I’m the Community Manager at Clearspring Technologies, the parent company of AddThis. Going forward, I will be working with Dom to help let you know about all the exciting developments planned for the AddThis sharing platform.

We’ve been heads down on adding and improving AddThis features. We want you to have the best tool possible for sharing your bookmarks and favorite Web pages.

Today, we’re pleased to announce a bunch of new features. Here’s a rundown:

Web Site Redesign & New Forum

First off, we’ve had our design and user-experience brain trust give the Web site a fresh coat of paint.  We hope that you like the new design. We want to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible for you to be able to grab/customize the AddThis button and view your stats.

When you go to view your reports, you’ll see that we’ve redesigned them too. We’ve put in all-new charts, which look hot and animate in a fun way, besides being way faster to generate than our old charts.  We’ve also added a forum. This is to better serve you and help you find answers to your problems. Hopefully this will also be a center of community and innovation around sharing, using the AddThis platform.

Analytics

We’ve integrated Clearspring’s analytics platform into AddThis. This means our analytics are going to be much faster and more reliable. Going forward, we’ll be able to collect more data and thus generate more reports that will show you how your content is getting shared across the Web.

Optimization

Our engineers have been working hard to optimize the AddThis sharing button. We want the button and menu to load as fast as possible. When your Web site or blog is getting viewed by a lot of people, every millisecond counts.  The button code is now just 3K at load time and only 17K once the user hovers and interacts with the menu. This continues to put us far ahead of the competition in regards to giving you the features you want, using the least amount code possible.

Localization

AddThis has also become a bit more worldly. We’ve recently added support for the following languages: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Taiwanese.

The Future & Feedback

Again, we are focused on making sure that AddThis has the best features possible. In order to do this, we’re depending on your feedback. Please join us in the forums to discuss the future! You can also reach me personally at justin@clearspring.com.

With a recent release, you can now share MapQuest Local pages with your friends and the world using AddThis. Back in early September, MapQuest launched MapQuest Local, a portal that aggregates information together about your town or city.

As you can see from the screenshot at the beginning of the post, just hover over the orange AddThis plus sign and you’ll see the traditional AddThis menu. If you click on the plus sign, you’ll get the pop-up menu.

So… go find your town with MapQuest Local and share the page with others.